


with all the kind mendacity of hints

by aurilly



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Drunkenness, Gen, Golden Age (Narnia), Magic, Memory Loss, Mild Debauchery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 11:20:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4664652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edmund sinks into bad behaviour, to the consternation of his sisters. But in the pit, he seeks the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with all the kind mendacity of hints

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snitchnipped](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snitchnipped/gifts).



> For snitchnipped, who asked for Edmund and vice. I hope it is even a little bit what you were looking for!

_A loving kiss on his forehead. A brown leather valise being thrust into his hands. Adult humans dressed in ugly, sombre patterns, their faces too high for a little boy to see in this melee. A crowd of crying children all around him. Dark grey smoke billowing so profusely that he cannot see. A loud crash, and the unnaturally hard ground beneath him shaking. Everyone screaming and ducking and holding their hands above their heads. An unearthly whistling noise all around him, deafening…_

Edmund woke, gasping, sucking in long draughts of salty seaside air instead of the sooty fumes that had been suffocating him a moment ago. He was covered in sweat, bangs plastered to his forehead. 

He’d been in no state to shut the curtains when he’d fallen on top of his sheets a couple of hours ago. All four royal apartments lay on the eastern side of the palace, overlooking the sea, and beyond it—or so the stories said—Aslan’s country. Architecturally, the layout made a beautiful, respectful, kind of sense, and Edmund’s room, decorated in cheerful silks and comfortable sofas, had been a beloved oasis for as long as he could remember. But this morning, the blinding eye-full of sunshine made his chamber the worst room in the entire kingdom. His eyes watered and his head throbbed from the wild jerk it had made upon waking from his terror. He rubbed the side of his neck. He’d have a crick in it later, he could already tell.

Reality was almost terrible enough to make him long for a return to the nightmare.

Except that for the past few months, ever since he’d tried some of the mushrooms prized by the moles in the Western Wild, Edmund’s grasp of where the dream ended and reality began had begun to slip. 

But the dwarves that made up the economic council did not care about his crisis of confusion. And that is what he had this morning, if the agenda on his nightstand was accurate, and it always was, because Susan had written it herself, in her perfect, swooping hand. The council meeting was set to start in, oh, eight minutes, if the golden clock sitting atop the agenda was to be believed. 

Edmund dragged himself out of bed and into the previous day’s tunic and leggings. No one would notice, he told himself.

* * *

“Fie, brother, wearing the same suit two days in a row?” Susan scolded at lunch. “We’re meant to be the sovereigns. We’re meant to embellish the court. Not appear rumpled like a truant just in off the street.”

He rested his face in his folded arms, letting the pressure against his jaw mash his food for him, for he was almost too tired to chew. After pretending to feel fine for three hours among dwarves who bickered and sniped at one another, a scolding was the last thing he had patience for.

“‘S’not the same clothes,” Edmund mumbled, hoping futilely that she’d go away. Or perhaps choke on a fig. Not enough to injure herself. Just enough to hush her until the end of lunch.

“Yesterday’s soup stain says otherwise. I hope you don’t mean to behave this way when the Calormene delegation arrives. Have you finished memorizing the Tisroc’s family tree and order of the great houses?”

“There’s plenty of time.”

“You don’t mean to leave all the work to me, do you? Not when you were the one to insist that we invite them. We must make a perfect impression if we are to solidify the treaties you have drafted. You know how particular they are, how steeped in ceremony and etiquette they are, and how easily offended.”

“More easily than yourself?”

Susan’s chin wobbled a bit, as it did when she was angry and frustrated, not when she was about to blub.

(A word neither she nor any of the others seemed to know. A word that often floated through Edmund’s nightmares, causing him to wonder if he had made it up. However, he found it an apt expression of the action. He’d had tried, with poor success, to introduce it into common parlance. But then again, he’d only happened to try it among the fauns, and everybody knew fauns were too merry to need many words for tears.)

“He has punished himself enough that he needs no external additions, Sister,” Lucy said, entering the room with a step that was far too bouncy for Edmund’s present nerves. “I hope your late night revels were pleasant enough to compensate for today’s pain.”

“Late night revels?” Susan raised one of her perfectly arched eyebrows at him. While Edmund’s eyebrows were not so meticulously shaped, it was the same expression that he often gave mischievous pages; the similarities between them were the reason they fought as often as they did. “Where could you possibly have been, Edmund? The village of Cair Paravel is not known for its lively after dark entertainment.”

“My doings are my business, Susan,” Edmund groaned. “I satisfied all the appointments on your agenda. All the remaining hours in the day belong to me. Unless you mean to extend your damnable scheduling to the evenings as well.”

“What’s gotten into you?” she asked. “You’ve been impossible lately. It’s almost as if you are returning to…”

“To what?”

She sighed—almost a sob—but she did not answer.

Edmund’s eyes were closed, but from the swish of her skirts and the clack of her heels, he could tell that Susan was rising in great state and majesty from her seat and strode from the room. Only once he heard the door slam behind her (ouch) did he open his eyes.

“You have truly incensed her this time,” Lucy said, and stretched to snatch a handful of blackberries from the top of the silver centerpiece. Stuffing five of them indecorously into her mouth and propping her feet up on Susan’s abandoned chair, she proceeded to help herself to a lunch consisting entirely of cake.

(Lucy had always appreciated Susan’s absences even more than Edmund did.)

“Where were you, Ed?” she asked. “You have that look about you. The look of a Marshwiggle the morning after too much tobacco and rum.” When Edmund didn’t answer, she rested sticky, black-stained fingers on his sleeve; the tunic would certainly need to be washed now. “If you are intending to continue doing whatever it is you are doing, I shan’t be able to cover for you don’t let me in.”

He sighed and used the power of his legs to scratch his chair sideways along the wooden floor and bring it closer to hers. Still too tired to lift his head properly, he simply turned it sideways and said, “Bacchus has returned to Narnia, with all his company. The fauns and dryads and residents of the forest on the Western edge of Narnia have been paying court to him for the past two days.”

“And so have you, it seems.”

Edmund grunted his assent. “Last night, I rode out as soon as supper was over, and I had one of the griffons fly me back shortly before dawn. Once this is over, I will give the sentries firm instructions to begin looking up during their rounds. For if _I_ can sneak into my window unnoticed, so could attackers.”

“It’s a wonder you were able to remain safely on the griffon’s back, given what I have heard about these festivities.”

“It was a close thing last night, but tonight I will ask them to tie me to him with vines so that I do not slip off.”

“But why, Ed? Why would you want to go back? Last night has left you in such an awful state. It can’t be worth this misery.”

“I have my reasons.”

“What are they? I won’t scold, but Susan is right. You _have_ been rather moody of late. The way you are when someone wakes you before time, or supper has not come soon enough.”

Edmund had tried to explain before, to Lucy herself, and even once to Peter. But they had only gotten that maddening dreamy look in their eyes, which bothered him even more, and so he’d given up. And there was no sense in trying with Susan. 

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

Lucy groaned. “You know that is my least favorite reason. You aren’t _that_ much older than I am. Fine, then. Keep your secrets. See if I care.”

* * *

Edmund could already tell the difference between the various types of vines that sprung up all around the little clearing in which Bacchus’s followers had set up camp. The green ones that grew underfoot were grapes such as one might find anywhere—except cooler, wetter and sweeter than any he had ever tasted. But the ones that cascaded down from the tree branches, the ones that sparkled in the moonlight and which hung heavier on their thin stems, contained already-fermented juice inside the thin skins. Rich, red wine, or the effervescent clearness of white.

“Welcome, my friend,” Bacchus said as he skipped around, producing fruit and sweets from his pockets and tossing them into the laps or open mouths of whoever happened to be nearby. 

“My lord,” Edmund said.

What a relief it was to be addressed as a friend, to remove the crown and let go of the king—to let go of absolutely everything. He hoped, though, after many trials, he had little confidence, that by letting go he could find that which lay hidden underneath. He took the heavy bunch of red grapes that Bacchus offered him and gulped them down. Edmund had skipped supper, in order to set out that much earlier. With nothing in his stomach, it would not be long before his knees buckled beneath him, his thoughts slowed to a sludge, and all pretense dripped away.

It was for this that Edmund had come. In part, at least.

In the meanwhile, he wandered around in search of familiar faces, stepping over dropsy foxes, around dancing mice whose entwined tails reinforced the circle created by their joined hands, and through the puddles surrounding coupling naiads. He finally spied Tumnus and a fellow faun reclining under the overhang of a large willow tree. They were taking turns petting each other and two pale, freckled birch-girls, all in a jumble. Tumnus’s hair and fur stood on all ends, there was a wet sheen across his bare chest, and his cheeks were flushed as red as his lust-blown eyes. He looked wholly debauched and entirely less polite than Lucy had ever imagined him, Edmund was sure. 

Edmund brushed the willow’s strands aside to enter the intimate little enclave. He flopped down near the group, content to just watch. He knew someone would come to him eventually. He _was_ the king, after all, and rather handsome, by all accounts (though he sometimes wondered if they only told him so because they had to).

“Tumnus,” Edmund asked when the four had paused to drink more. “Do you remember the first time you met my sister?”

Tumnus flushed even redder, this time with something like embarrassment. “My love for the queen knows no limits, but do you think now is quite the moment to—”

“This is no underhanded scolding. Even friends and councilors as staunch as yourself—not to mention kings— need a night off, and a chance to rest their feet… or hooves, I suppose. I have no intention of telling Lucy anything that passes tonight. I ask for my own purposes. Again, do you remember?”

“Like it was yesterday, Your Highness.”

“I told you, it’s only Edmund today,” Edmund said. “But what I meant to ask was… Did she tell you anything of where she had come from?” 

“From the bright city of War Drobe, of course, in the land of Spare Oom.”

Edmund nodded, already feeling the comforting (and recently, addicting) effects of the wine working upon his head, giving him the courage to ask the nonsensical questions that plagued him. “Did it not strike you as odd that she hailed from a city that sounded like a piece of furniture? Did you never wonder that such a land has never been heard of nor visited, in any of the histories nor in any of the lore?”

Tumnus tried to think, but no one could blame the faun for being rather slow just now. “No, but life is full of coincidences and delightful surprises. A word that means one thing to you and me may mean quite another in the language of a far-off people. And there are islands to the East and countries to the North that no one has ever been brave enough to explore. But why do you ask? Surely you remember it.”

“That’s just the rub,” Edmund said. “I don’t. But sometimes…”

The wine hit him like a train—a train, he wondered vaguely, from where had that word emerged and what did it mean?—and he could not give voice to what he meant to say. He wanted to say that he remembered in his dreams, but those dreams wafted away as did the puffs of smoke from Tumnus’s pipe. He wanted to say that the harder he tried to hold on, the more difficult holding became.

“Do you seek to remember, dear Edmund?” Bacchus said, from much closer than Edmund had last known him to be. He and Silenus had come to join them in the overhang, along with a passel of girls and a dryad on his arm. “Is that why you come to me?”

“That, and other things,” Edmund said, squeezing the wild Maenad girls who snuggled against him, one on his right and another on his left, practically on top of him as they took turns dropping grapes into his mouth and licking away the juices that dribbled out the side. He relaxed into them, letting them kiss away his troubles, if only for tonight.

Such diversions were too rarely on offer at Cair Paravel, or in Narnia at all, in fact. Edmund hadn’t seen a human girl since he’d last visited Anvard, almost six months ago, much less girls like these, soft and sweet and willing. With them, unlike with Archenland or Galman girls, there were no consequences nor need for ceremony.

“While I hope the attractions of my peripatetic court continue to draw you to me,” Bacchus said, “this is the one desire that I cannot grant. What I serve is forgetting, not remembrance. Loss, not discovery. Loss of self, a release from worry, the drifting away of painful recollections. If it is memory you seek, you must look for it elsewhere.”

“Do you have any suggestions?”

* * *

On the strength of Bacchus’s word, he announced a desire to check in on the southern settlements. 

“Whatever for?” Peter asked. 

“And the Calormene will be here soon,” Susan added. “This is hardly the moment to go gallivanting off.”

“Perhaps I can meet them at the harbor in Archenland, as a courtly surprise. I could present myself to them in Anvard where, as you know they are stopping first. I could sail with them up the coast and into Cair Paravel. That would make for an even grander welcome, don’t you think?”

Peter drummed his fingers against the table as he thought. “Yes, that is a happy thought. A royal welcome before the royal welcome. What do you think, Su?”

Susan watched Edmund’s concentrated placid face for the hidden purpose she was clever enough to know lay beneath it, but he was too practiced in diplomacy to let her see anything. He’d learned from the best, after all—he’d learned from her.

Seeing nothing, she could do little but relent. “It is indeed a happy thought. We look forward to your return, brother.”

And so, Edmund rode down to Anvard on his own, since, if his plan was to surprise the ambassadors and invite himself onto their ship for a day, it would be rude to come with a large entourage of his own. He had finally recovered from his nights in the forest (though he kept some wine that Bacchus had fortified especially for him in a flask at his hip), but he took it slow nonetheless. 

He took the long way, down the smaller paths and through villages instead of towns. He paused, as was his duty, whenever he passed a bowing citizen (though it took some of the smaller ones jumping out of their bows and shouting to get his attention, for which he always apologized). He was in no rush, and had left in plenty of time, in order to enjoy the quiet of life away from court.

The landscape reminded him, in a way he could not quite grasp, of something long lost. Images of Spare Oom, he decided it had to be. Country roads and rolling hills and smoking chimneys and vegetables planted in neat roads. 

But with talking beasts, of course, as the main difference. Because even though Edmund could not quite remember the country of his birth, he knew that he hailed from a land of men, where at the age he was now, he should not have had to wait for Bacchus’s arrival to see girls. 

A land where he’d once had a mother and father and a home—of this he was certain, though the memories mixed with contradictory images. Alongside parents were images of stern adults who he was certain were no relation, and yet who were in charge of him. And alongside fleeting images of a home and a bedroom that he shared only with Peter, he sometimes dreamed of long, dark rooms with rows of stacked beds filled with other boys the same age. He did not know why, but he could picture himself sneaking out of his bed armed with a needle in his hand and spite in his heart, his target a hot water bottle belonging to another boy. 

The Narnians thought Edmund and his siblings had emerged fully formed on the edge of the Western Wood, that they had been conjured from the Earth by the magic of Aslan, as had all of their ancestors at the beginning of the world. The scholars considered the Spare Oom of which Tumnus spoke merely a metaphor for the state of being that preceded life. It was a pretty theory, and as the years went by, Edmund’s siblings had stopped disputing it. Indeed, Edmund was almost certain they believed it.

He wanted to believe it, too. Life would have been so much easier if he could give into the easy answer and free himself from this recent longing and hazy confusion. Even his first days in Narnia were a blur. There was something terrible, he could feel it. There had to be a reason for it. A reason that he didn’t have a Gift, but he could not remember. His first clear thought was of waking on the field of battle, with an unnervingly fast-healing gash across his abdomen, and a puddle of his own blood under his back.

The story of the four humans’ appearance in Narnia, and their liberation of the land from the Witch’s long, cold reign had become a favourite over the years. Susan had coached the storytellers and tweaked the tale to perfection. The miracle of their appearance and might became their calling card to the kings around the world. 

When he’d tried asking Peter if something about it felt off to him, too, Peter had simply looked dreamy and said, “No, of course not. That is how it transpired. Why do you ask?”

Something was terribly wrong. If only he could remember.

* * *

A few miles outside of Anvard, he left his charger in the care of a stable owner and borrowed a lesser horse for the rest of the journey. In a cave a little farther along, he changed into the disguise he had packed in his saddlebag. With his red wig, false mole, and Archenlandian garb, no one would ever recognize the king of Narnia.

He knocked on the door of a fine house on the outskirts of town and introduced himself as a messenger from the castle. The servants led him to the garden, where Dar and Darrin were sparring for practice. 

“What is your message?” Darrin asked absently.

“If a friend such as yourself does not recognize me, then I can rest assured, no one will,” Edmund said. 

He removed his false spot and shook his black hair out from where it had been trapped under the wig. 

“Edmund!” they both exclaimed.

Within minutes, his feet were up on an ottoman, and a wine glass was in his hand.

(For all that he kept trying to escape himself and his life in order to chase a humdrum dream, or memory, or whatever it was… It was good to be the king.)

“You came at just the right time, Your Highness,” Dar said.

“Just Edmund, today, it you please.” 

“Just Edmund or ‘Edmund the Just’?” Darrin teased. He’d always considered it the prattiest title ever bestowed.

And Edmund had always agreed. There weren’t words for how much he hated his moniker, and how it weighed on him, like a heavy noose around his neck just waiting to be tightened. It was as though someone—probably Aslan, though he hardly dared to even _think_ such a blasphemous thought—had given it to him as a punishment and constant reminder… Though in punishment for what, and as a reminder of what, Edmund had no idea. 

So, instead, he was left with all the annoyance, and none of the benefit.

“Why is this a good time to visit?” he asked.

“The Calormene ambassadors pulled into port this morning, along with a second ship carrying their staff, supplies and an entire party of entertainers. The whole lot of them are said to be headed to the village tonight, looking for fun.”

“What kind of entertainers?” Edmund asked with false innocence, and let them try to explain.

But Bacchus had told him of this. It was for this that he had come.

* * *

Two hours later, Edmund and his now equally-disguised friends entered a general store. They looked around for the guard, whom they had been told would be wearing a pink carnation. They paid him a large sum and told him the passcode. With a nod, he led them to a door at the back and ushered them through the courtyard and into a small building at the other side.

This secret Anvard tavern, with its strong drinks and illegal ‘dormitory’ upstairs, had always been one of Dar’s and Darrin’s favorite haunts. But tonight, more people and smells and words filled the low-ceilinged room than Edmund had ever seen on his previous visits. The owner must have hired more… companions… to satisfy the exceptional demand, perhaps borrowed them from other outposts around the country. Loud music, struck up impromptu by visiting Calormene musicians, reduced all conversations to shouting matches.

The only time that Edmund could remember having been surrounded by this many tightly packed human bodies was in the dream that haunted him. The sweet and heady hookah smoke that muted all the shapes and colors reminded him of the smoke that had been in the dream, too. The smoke reminded him of something else, as well, something he could not immediately place.

“Argh,” he said, slapping his forehead.

“What is it?” Darrin asked.

“It is as though I am an old man sometimes, unable to hold onto a thought. Why? What is wrong with me?” he asked, even though he knew they could not answer, for he had not told them of his troubles. He had not told anyone.

Dar handed him some wine. “Tonight you have no worries, Ed. Relax.”

Only hours later did Edmund spot what he had come for. He staggered his way to a corner where sat the magicians Bacchus had told him would be here. They had arrived later, after the brothers had already plied Edmund with more wine than he’d intended to drink.

The magicians sat in a half-circle, lolling picturesquely together in a variety of poses. The smoke was thickest here. Edmund had to swipe it away in order to see them. 

“Yes?” the eldest of the group asked.

“I was told that you sell memories.”

“We do not sell. We trade. What do you have to offer us, young king?”

Edmund didn’t bother asking how they knew who he was. If knowledge was their stock in trade, such declarations were their calling card. Their ability to see through his disguise increased his confidence. 

“I can give you gold, jewels, letters of introduction to any court in the world.” Edmund listed these and more (everything he could think of that he might manage without his siblings finding out).

“We want the flask you carry on your hip,” the old man said, after shaking his head at every single one of Edmund’s offers. “Wine created and blessed by Bacchus himself is a precious gift.”

The next to speak was a handsome man with kohl-lined eyes and a firm, chiseled jaw, whom Edmund guessed was the sleight of hand man. His face would distract almost anyone from what his hands might be doing. “We want the piece of Turkish Delight that you have kept all these years. Relics of the power that created it have become rarer and rarer.”

“We want a vial of blood drawn by your hand, from your hand,” said the youth whose litheness suggested he was the contortionist of the group. “Blood such as yours is a treasure we have never had access to.”

“And lastly,” the lone female—the tale-spinner—said with a twinkle in her eye, “we would like a kiss.”

“Is that all?” Edmund asked.

The old man nodded.

“Then we have a trade.”

Edmund delivered the kiss to the girl on the spot (it was no hardship).

“It was actually meant for him,” she said with a laugh, pointing at the one with the jaw, “but I was hoping for you to misunderstand and thus reap a bonus.”

Edmund turned to the man. He made this one count (equally no hardship). At some point during the proceedings, when he was too busy losing his breath in the feeling of a tongue massaging his own, the man he was kissing must have liberated the flask from Edmund’s belt loop and replaced it with a sinuously curving dagger.

“Let it fall into this,” the youth said when they had finished, and passed Edmund a mouth-blown green glass vial.

Cutting into his palm deeply enough to fill an entire vial should have hurt more than it did, but he was drunk on wine and the lingering tingle of the man’s lips. He felt little more than a dull ache as he sliced into himself and coaxed the drops of blood to their destination.

“I do not have the Turkish Delight with me.” He assumed they knew he had such a thing the way they had known everything else. He didn’t know where it had come from, or why he had kept it all these years—or even properly what it was—but he knew what it was called and he knew that it was an important reminder of… something. It was the only tangible relic he had of whatever it was he had lost. He was loath to part with it, but the artifact was a small price to pay for the larger prize. 

“We will collect it from you when we reach Narnia,” the old man said.

The girl had been digging through a dark red velvet sack in the corner. She produced a glass bottle filled with a pale green liquid and attached to it a long, long rubber tube that ended in the largest needle Edmund had ever seen. 

“You felt the magic of the smoke when you entered, didn’t you?” she asked. When Edmund nodded, she continued, “A kind of hypnotic, addicting magic that you have met once before, I feel certain. You have that look about you. The effects the smoke has in the room are meant only to relax, and ease the pleasure of the revelers. But for the effects you seek, a distilled version is required, as well as direct application into the vein.”

“It works on the blood, you see,” continued the youth. “It will have an even more powerful effect on yours.”

“I do not understand,” Edmund said. “What is so special about my blood? What makes it so rare?”

Instead of answering, they led him upstairs. Edmund passed a room whose door had been left half-open, and nodded knowingly to Darrin, before shutting it and securing his friend’s privacy going forward. 

The magicians led him to the last room on the hallway, which was the only empty one. They removed the elements of his disguise and then helped him out of his clothes until he was stretched out naked on the bed. The man he had kissed sat beside him. He smoothed Edmund’s hair and sucked on Edmund’s fingers, one by one, while the youth unraveled the long tube. 

It was a good thing he was so drunk, or else the thought of being laid bare in the presence of dubious foreign magicians would have sent alarm bells ringing. But as it was, he merely felt half asleep, half aroused, and more soothed and hopeful than he had in a long while.

“Have you told anyone in the Calormene delegation that you are coming?” the old man asked.

Edmund shook his head. “It was meant to be a courteous surprise.”

“Then there will be no harm done when you fail to meet them tomorrow. We look forward to seeing you in your home,” the old man said. “And perhaps you will be kind enough to share what you have learned when next we see you.”

“What do you mean, when next you see me? Where are you going? And why wouldn’t I be able to meet them tomorrow?”

The girl and the handsome man with the kohl-lined eyes trailed naughty fingers up and down his body, touching and tickling so that he was too distracted to notice a tight band being tied around his upper arm and the needle breaching the skin at the crook of his elbow. 

“It is not a question of where we are going,” the girl whispered with a final kiss. “It is where _you_ are going, and where you have been. Until soon, sweet king.”

And then Edmund knew no more.

* * *

No, actually, this was not true.

Edmund finally knew everything.

* * *

He didn’t know how he’d gotten here, but the damn sunlight was streaming into his window, blinding him, and he was retching all over his nightstand. All over last week’s agenda. 

Susan sat on the bed beside him with her hands folded.

“What in Aslan’s name…” he muttered as soon as he could speak. 

“We haven’t much time,” she said calmly, but there was something terrible and sad and frightened in her voice. “The Calormene ship has been sighted. They will put into port within the hour.”

“I am in no shape to…”

“I mixed you a recipe I learned from one of the fauns, for just such an occasion. You should be right as rain in a few minutes.”

“Susan!” Edmund exclaimed in surprise and mock-scolding, louder than he meant to. The unexpected boom of his own voice reverberated through his head. He fell back against his pillows, groaning.

Susan smiled, but the expression of her mouth was just as enigmatically sad as the one in her eyes. “I can be naughty, too, brother. Come. Have some water.” 

She cradled Edmund’s head in her hands, wiped his face with her silken handkerchief, and put the glass to his lips. When he had drunk the entire draught, she refilled his glass with something that smelled of raw egg and turpentine. 

It was disgusting but, as she’d predicted, he felt better in minutes. Better all over again. With new clarity, he looked up at her, just as a tear fell onto his nose. He saw etched there the same truths that he had just remembered.

“What day is it?” he asked.

“Five days after you left.”

It was the next morning, he calculated. They’d somehow sent him home. 

“How did you know I would be here?” he asked next.

“I’m not sure. I just had a feeling to check in your room, and I saw you sleeping, in the way of a man who is about to have a very terrible waking. So I ran down to the kitchen and mixed the recipe, and ran back up. And I knew… I knew that you knew, somehow.”

“You’ve remembered the entire time, haven’t you?” he asked, feeling another drop of wetness, and another.

She nodded. “It’s all my fault.”

“What? How?”

“It was I who said you ought not to be told. I wanted to spare your feelings. I took the same approach with Lucy, thinking that if we stopped talking about it, she would stop being frightened, stop missing Mother and Father and wondering if they are worried about us, or grieving… It has been so long. They must think us dead, and yet we are here, gay and happy. It… it isn’t fair. It is better to forget, I thought. So I said the story was the story and that was all. But then… then it escalated out of control, and no one no longer knew _anything_. If we had told you—if I’d let the others tell you—you wouldn’t have needed to seek the answers. Perhaps if we’d talked about it, they wouldn’t have forgotten. But we never told you, and now Peter and Lucy have forgotten, and the emptiness in your mind drove you to… to such lengths… and I have lived with the secret in my heart.”

She worried the place in Edmund’s arm where the needle had pierced until he flinched. 

“Sorry,” she said, for more than the pain.

“If you don’t have hard feelings about what I did, I don’t either.”

“Aslan himself forgave you. Of course I did, too. Peter and Lucy did, as well, before they forgot. I promise you.”

He sat up and hugged her. “You have lived with greater pain, carrying this alone in your heart all this while.”

“It was my doing. I deserved to live with the consequences.”

“It’s all right, Su,” he said. “You meant well. You’re too gentle-hearted for your own good, is all.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “And you are too just.”

Edmund groaned, and Susan giggled. 

“How shall we tell them?” she said. “Because now that you know, I can’t bear to keep it from the others.”

Edmund looked at the hole in his arm and then out the window where the masts of the two Calormene ships were already coming into view.

“The way sails to our door as we speak.”


End file.
